A couple of days of fiddling around at work. A few short edits, of various types, filling out an application, doing some sample edits, that sort of thing. It was not particularly satisfying work as none of it gave a sense of completion or at least of getting a decent payment for it. I’ve also […]
Deadline
Yesterday was the submission deadline for a document that had been badly disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak. We squeezed it out under the wire. In the process I managed to annoy my oldest colleague/ friend at the organisation who doesn’t like his indolence to be brought to attention. Some years ago I think I would […]
To Da’an
This morning we moved to Da’an. We called an uncle who has one of those gigantic taxis and loaded it up with all our belongings: two suitcases each (one large, one small), assorted backpacks and handbags, and a few bags of household stuff acquired here: lamps from ikea, mugs, the GF’s basketball, the Woodland Creature’s […]
Fish soup
We took our bags to Chinese lessons today – it was the other teacher who is much, much better than the one on Monday. She took our Line accounts (which I created only for the purpose of Taiwan travel as I don’t use it otherwise), and has been sending up pictures and videos all day. […]
Two meals
On Sunday afternoon my father and I went for lunch to the home of his closest friend, a former military man from the mountainous north, with a very impressive moustache. It was a bit of a duty but not very as I’m fond of both him and his wife, who was very kind during my […]
Moving on
I’m back in the office but only for a couple of hours, and for a particularly useless meeting. Next I go for a haircut, then Lahore. I had bad dreams last night: there was a child who was a younger sibling (though not one of my actual siblings) with a pet rabbit which had to […]
It never really ends
All was supposed to be finished yesterday and I came home to make myself a cup of tea when an email popped up. I looked at it, it was from work. The materials we’d uploaded well in advance of the deadline had gone haywire: the aardvark text was under guppies and the the coyote material […]
Night terrors
I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced that everything had gone terribly wrong with work and that I would never recover. It took me a long time to get to sleep and I only managed after making a careful plan for the morning to double-check everything and after reading a couple of […]
Winding down
We are winding down at work now, or rather I am, as everyone else who is actually employed here remains at full tilt. This is undoubtedly the nicest thing about consultancy work, any feeling of being trapped lasts only until the end of the project and then I can safely return to fearing I’ll never […]
Auspicious beginning
I rang in the decade lying in bed, working — not even on my own work but something very similar for someone else. I tried desperately to finish up before midnight so I could maintain my tradition of being fast asleep for the new year, but didn’t succeed, and it wasn’t till about 20 minutes […]